Field
This disclosure is generally related to Information Centric Networks. More specifically, this disclosure is related to an access control framework for publishing and accessing encrypted data.
Related Art
Information-centric networking architectures (ICNs) are quickly becoming an attracting alternative to the current host-to-host design Internet design in both research and industrial communities. Several novel networking architectures have been recently proposed as instances of the ICN. The most common and fundamental features of these ICN architectures include interest-based content retrieval, content oriented routing, and in-network caching. Interest-based content retrieval and content oriented routing allow users to acquire content from the network via explicit queries for uniquely named content, rather than by establishing point-to-point connection with a target computer that can serve the content. In-network caching permits a router to cache content for predetermined lengths of time such that subsequent requests for content of the same name can be satisfied via the cache, rather than by forwarding the request upstream to a network endpoint identified by the request.
Due to in-network caching, ICN content objects may not always arrive from their original producer. However, if the cached content was encrypted for a given consumer, it is not possible for other consumers to decrypt the content even though they're authorized to access the content. Therefore, ICN architectures typically require requests for encrypted content to be forwarded directly to the content producer so that each consumer can receive a copy of the content which has been encrypted using the consumer's public key. Unfortunately, requiring ICN nodes to forward requests to the content producer does not allow the consumer and publisher to benefit from in-network caching, which can result in slow response times for the consumer and undesirably large request loads for the content producer.